Designing infrastructures and services is a very challenging task: designers should take in account the maintainability of the infrastructure or of the service, along with guaranteeing a quick delivery when service requests come thus being in compliance with security requirements.

While designing infrastructures or services, professionals should consider to:

take in account existing corporate workflows and processes
comply to corporate standards
comply to regulatory
comply to the expected Service Level Agreements
guess an easy path to keep everything current, limiting or even avoiding service interruption while patching and upgrading
design the backup and restore processes
design and implement business continuity if necessary

You may be tempted to think that the difficulty is having a thorough knowledge of design patterns and protocols, but it isn’t like so: this is still just scratching the surface. Despite it seems that the designer should “only” turn the requirements into reality, in the real world things go differently: professionals are often engaged with a very few and undermined requirements, coming from people that are more close to the business than to the IT.

This means that in practice it’s up to the designer to ensure that the provided requirements are all the ones necessary for the use case, adding other ones if necessary.

In addition to that the professional should also design the whole process, not only the infrastructure or services: in a lean environment that relies on service requests the designer should also take care to design all the necessary workflows that integrate what they are designing into the existing set of workflows. This means that before designing the resource, the designer should guess the necessary workflows to enable user requests to get access to the resource or withdraw from it. This should comply not only to the corporate standards but also to security regulations. And most of all, it should be easy to use, since it is targeted to users that already have a lot of things to do rather than learning inefficient processes. I think that this part, that is probably the most challenging, is often underestimated, with the outcome of an overall delay when it comes to delivering service, causing wasting of time and money one projects slowing down time to market.

Full featured C project managed by make and packaged as RPM

Posted on February 17, 2022February 22, 2022 by Marco Antonio Carcano

The aim of this post is showing a tidy way to structure a C o C++ project managing the build lifecycle using the GNU Make and packaging it as RPM.

The post demonstrates a full featured C project managed by make and packaged as RPM, showing how to set up a tidy structure, develop and package a C application with its own shared objects, that reads the configuration from a file, validates settings, logs events into a file and handles error conditions printing to standard error and setting properly shell return code.

This post is certainly useful not only to developers, but to anybody who wants to learn how to build third part C or C++ software, since it clearly describes the compilation and linking process. In addition to that, we also learn how to create the product certificate that can be exploited by the subscription-manager to know that the product is installed on the system.

The application is then packaged, besides as a gzipped tarball, also as RPM, creating the application package, the package with the development resource files (the C include files) and the package with the debug information that can be used with a debugger to troubleshoot things.

This post is focused on the C programming language, but the very most of the concepts related to the build life-cycle managed with GNU Make shown apply to C++ too: I chose C only to show a way of doing things that works also with a legacy (but yet powerful) programming language. In addition to that, be wary that I'm striving to cover most of the scenarios: this means that I'm showing things that are not always necessary in every use case.

Designing infrastructures – defining corporate’s standard tiers

Posted on April 13, 2021May 15, 2021 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Infrastructures are the foundations used to provide services: since services are subjected to confidentiality and availability requirements, infrastructures must be designed so to provide several confidentiality and availability tiers. This way a service can be placed on the part of the infrastructure that meets the availability and confidentiality requirements for its use case. This means that one of the very first things to do when designing infrastructures is defining the corporate's standard tiers.